Fuel, fans, and cores - An introduction to selected papers from HotPower 2013

As the Program Co-Chairs for HotPower 2013, we are delighted to have this opportunity and write a few words about the workshop, especially three selected papers presented there. Started in 2009 by Feng Zhao, HotPower, a.k.aWorkshop on Power-Aware Computing and Systems, has provided a forum in which researchers and practitioners present the latest research and debate directions, challenges, and novel ideas about building energy-efficient computing systems. It has been co-located with either SOSP or OSDI, mainly attracting people who build and manage systems; and 2013 was its fifth occurrence. We received 38 submissions in 2013, reviewed primarily by a Program Committee (PC) of 17. The PC members came from both industry and academia roughly 50-50; their expertise collectively covered a wide range of computing systems from sensors to data centers and from micro architecture to human factors. The submissions were reviewed in a single round; most of them received four or more reviews. After some on-line discussion, 19 submissions went into a half-day virtual PC meeting; and 13 of them were accepted for the workshop program. The 13 accepted papers were representative of the submissions with authors from four continents. They came from both academia and industry roughly 50-50. The workshop ran for a day started by a keynote by Ranveer Chandra from Microsoft Research about the energy optimization work he had transferred to Microsoft’s products, and ended by a panel discussion about the energy efficiency of data centers with Rini Kaushik (IBM Research), Brian Lewis (Intel Labs), and Jie Liu (Microsoft Research). The workshop drew a loyal crowd that filled the room as shown by Figure 1. The authors of one paper were not able to attend the workshop physically due to visa issues but stayed up overnight to present their paper and answer questions from the other side of the globe, via Skype. It is usually a tough job for PC chairs to select a few papers to represent a technical program. We had an easy one: we ranked the accepted papers by their average overall scores by reviewers and the top three are the ones we picked. They coincidentally covered all three major aspects of power : thermal management, energy supply, and battery lifetime. They also covered Figure 1: Aaron Carroll from NICTA presenting one of the three selected papers in the last session of the workshop (Courtesy of Feng Zhao)